The Journey to Your Cloud

Driving Business Agility Through IT Agility

Businesses today depend upon IT to drive innovation and accelerate competitive advantages. Cloud computing enables businesses to deliver new services, enter into new markets, get closer to customers and make increasingly mobile and demanding employees more productive.

The most successful organizations use cloud technologies as a catalyst to put in place new systems and processes that free IT organizations to maximize not just operational metrics, but business results.

Paul Chapman: Part 1 - Efficiency, Agility, and Control in the IT Organization

Paul Chapman: Part 2 - The Foundation of the Software-Defined Data Center

Paul Chapman: Part 3 - Building the Workforce of the Future

A New Operating Model for Your Cloud

Cloud enables you to redefine the way IT produces and delivers services for your business. The goal isn't to merely become a more efficient, agile and reliable IT organization—although cloud certainly delivers that—but to form a new partnership with business stakeholders based upon innovation and business value.

IT organizations face unprecedented challenges today:

Pressure to be more flexible and innovative to rapidly address competitive threats and satisfy user demands.

The need to deliver higher levels of efficiency and responsiveness to compete with low cost, on-demand services from external suppliers.

Continue to provide reliability, security and governance for all applications and services required by the business.

While some IT organizations are consumed with simply maintaining existing systems and responding to an ever growing backlog of projects, an increasing number of organizations are embracing cloud to find new ways to successfully partner with the business, delivering value and differentiation that advance the goals of the business.

A New Operating Model for your Cloud

Empowering Your IT Organization with Cloud Computing

There are two key elements required to achieve the full potential of cloud computing: choosing the right technology platform to underpin your cloud, and putting in place an operating model optimized for the advantages of cloud. In short, the most successful organizations have embraced cloud as a comprehensive IT strategy, examining how to build, rent, operate and staff their cloud environment, while measuring the efficiency, agility and reliability improvements achieved through cloud computing.

In working with global enterprises and service providers, VMware has found distinct categories of IT organizations and their capabilities as they move to embrace cloud computing:

Reactive – With IT exhausting resources to maintain existing systems, the organization is challenged to make the desired contribution to future business results. The need for rapid innovation has driven business stakeholders outside of traditional IT channels, creating a tension between IT and business stakeholders. As a result, cloud has entered the business opportunistically, threatening to create silos of activities that cannot satisfy the mandates for security, risk management and compliance.

Proactive – IT has moved to embrace cloud as a model for achieving innovation through increased efficiency, reliability and agility. Shifts in processes and organizational responsibilities attempt to bring structure to cloud decisions and directions. More importantly, IT has embraced a new role, that of a service broker. IT is now able to leverage external providers to deliver rapid innovation within the governance structure of IT, balancing costs, risks and services levels.

Innovative – IT has fully implemented cloud computing as their model for producing and consuming computing, shifting legacy systems to a more flexible infrastructure. They've invested in automation and policy-based management for greater efficiency and reliability, enabling a broad range of stakeholders to consume IT services via self-service. They've also detailed measurement capabilities that quantify the financial impact of sourcing decisions allowing them to redirect saved resources and drive new services and capabilities that advance business goals.

Why VMware?

VMware is the common element behind some of the largest and most successful cloud implementations around the world, including private cloud environments operating within businesses of all sizes and the global ecosystem of public cloud providers leveraging VMware technology as a standard foundation.

VMware
cloud computing solutions improve IT efficiency, agility and reliability and help drive innovation. By combining the technologies, services and guidance required to build, operate, staff and manage your cloud, VMware cloud solutions help organizations maximize the benefits of cloud computing. The technical foundation of VMware cloud solutions,
VMware vCloud Suite® is the industry’s first complete and integrated cloud infrastructure suite and the platform underpinning the software-defined data center Cloud. vCloud Suite dramatically simplifies IT operations and delivers the best service-level agreements (SLAs) for all applications.